I didnt complete my 50 book challenge of this year, even though i started a little early. 

though in my defence, i've moved home twice, started my last year of an intensive uni course AND had to work upto 30 hours a week because my student loan didn't come through on time. 

my full list is here. 
does anyone have any recommendations for me for next year from these? 

Title: Gwenhyfar: The White Spirit
Author: Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Arthurian fantasy.
Setting: The Britain of the Round Table.
Reason for Reading: I read almost everything that Lackey writes.
Pages: 401
Copyright Date: 2009
Cover: A battered shield with several points missing. A plain, slightly rusty sword.
First line: "The talk at the hearth of the high hall of her father's castle was all of magic that wild evening."
Best part: This Arthurian fantasy has the least mention of Arthur in any I've read and that made it so interesting.
Worst part: Evil lookalike sister? Fer realz?
Imaginary Theme Song: "Take the Road" from Never After
Grade: C+
Recommended for: Anyone who likes to read about badass women warriors.
Related Reads: By the Sword by Mercedes Lackey, The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon, The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

( WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!! THIS QUOTE HAS SPOILERS!! )

As a whole, I'm not overly impressed with what I read this year, though there were some amazing reads in my list... and I came up just shy of my low goal of 52 books.

( What I read in 2009 )

x-posted



'Tis the time for year-enders eh? Members of Livejournal group bookish  here lists their worst reads of the year.

I'll just list the books I enjoyed this year. For individual reviews of some of these books, just click on "books" and/or "reading".

Boy do I read a lot.

1. Rosemary's Baby
2. A Game of Thrones
3. The Haunting of Hill House
4. The Blind Assassin
5. Transmetropolitan
6. The Swamp Thing Vol. 1
7. Year's Best SF 14
8. Solaris Book of New SF
9. Trese 1-3
10. Boogers Are My Beat
11. Sleepaway, an anthology of writings on summer camp edited by Eric Simonoff
12. Big If
13. The Green Mile
14. Revolutionary Road
15. Mrs. Dalloway
16. A Clockwork Orange
17. Lunar Park
18. Blindness
19. Then We Came to the End
20. Heart-Shaped Box
21. The Year of Magical Thinking
22. Nouveau Bored (poetry)
23. You Are Here (poetry)
24. Libot ng Durungawan (poetry)
25. Kundi Akala (poetry)
26. The Highest Hiding Place (poetry)

I'm still reading The Beauty Myth and Ender's Game, but I'm pretty sure they'll be first on my 2010 list. :)

Happy New Year, all. :D

My book goal for 2009 was 50 books.  While I didn't meet my goal, I did manage to read 35 books.  All were pretty good, my favorites are marked with an *

*The Picture of Dorian Gray
A Christmas Carol
Evasion
*Home Accross the Road
Old School
The Awakening
*Strange Pilgrims
*Farewell to Arms
*The collected works of Gabriel Gracia Marquez
Lies my teacher told me
*Night
A Framework for Understanding Poverty
*Demascus Gate
Children of the New World
*Breaking the walls of Silance
*House of Sand and Fog
*My War at Home: A memoir
Snow Falling on Ceders
*Chronicle of a Death Fortold
*I Killed Hemmingway
Kite Runner
*Three Cups of Tea
A Thousand Splended Suns
In an Ancient Land
*My Journey to Lasha
A Good Rat
The Book of Samson
*Tuesdays with Morrie
Nowhere Man
Triathlon
Running and Racing after 35
Mallory and Irving
Winds of War
Symbols of Buddhism
Buddist Scripture

For 2010 my reading goal is still 50, first book up: Winkie

Crossposted to my journal

Author: Eoin Colfer
Published: 3rd Jan 2008
Rating: 4/5

Airman is a really big surprise. It was published barely before the most recent Artemis Fowl, The Time Paradox, but I read that book first, and the difference between the skill of writing in the two books is amazing. Airman is a mix of the Count of Monte Cristo and YA fiction. Conor Broeckhart, the protagonist, lives a charmed life with his influential father and his brilliant mother. He receives the very best childhood education, courtesy of his mentor, Victor Vigny in the principality of the Saltee Islands. Friend to the king and his daughter, Conor is brilliant, handsome, and completely and utterly obsessed with the idea of flight. But when he stumbles upon a plot to kill the king, his whole life goes to pieces, and he's tossed into the notorious Little Saltee prison island, rather like the Chateau D'If. The book follows Conor as he escapes from prison, and deals with Conor as he tries (and fails) to forget his family, and the overthrow of the person behind the assassination plot.

The dialogue is sketchy, especially between Isabella, the princess, and Conor. It reminds me a little of Paolini's dialogue, too stiff to be natural, and very much like an imitation. It's like Colfer pulled out an eighteenth century book to mimc after writing book after book on Artemis Fowl, and the result is not good. It's not bad all the time, but there is no sparkling wit in conversations. But the best thing about this book is the setting. Airman is the first non-Artemis Fowl book I've read from Colfer, and he does a proficient job of describing an alternate verse of history. The Saltee Islands are tucked in a civilized but small corner of the world, but Colfer adds in little details about Waterloo and some of the conflict in Europe prior to the first World War, and that just established the Saltee Islands as something that really could exist. The details about planes I kind of skipped, but it does seem like Colfer did his research on those. I don't know how aeroplanes get off the ground though, so I could be wrong.

The characters are mostly good, if a little simple. The side characters tend to be stronger, and Conor is a little too perfect for me to completely like. Overall though, Airman is a very good book to pick up. It's mature and intricate, and the whole book is well tied together.

Liar (2009)
Written by: Justine Larbalestier
Genre: YA/Fiction
Pages: 371 (Hardcover)

The premise: ganked from BN.com: Micah will freely admit she’s a compulsive liar, but that may be the one honest thing she’ll ever tell you. Over the years she’s fooled everyone: her classmates, her teachers, even her parents. And she’s always managed to stay one step ahead of her lies. That is, until her boyfriend dies under brutal circumstances and her dishonesty begins to catch up with her. But is it possible to tell the truth when lying comes as easily as breathing?

Taking listeners deep into the psyche of a young woman who will say just about anything to convince them — and herself — that she’s finally come clean, Liar is a bone-chilling thriller that will have listeners seesawing between truths and lies right up to the end. Honestly.

My Rating

Keeper Shelf: there are very, very, VERY few books that I want to keep around to re-read over and over and over, but this is definitely one of them. The book engaged me on so many levels that I can't wait to read it again and see how the story changes. And because of the book's deliberate yet delightful ambiguity, this is a book I can enjoy over and over and come away with a different interpretation every time. If you're a reader who absolutely MUST HAVE a DEFINITE ENDING with DEFINITE ANSWERS, you may want to shy away from this one. But oh, that'd be a shame. This book is so well-crafted that you'd be missing out on a really great story. Like I said, whether you read YA or not, if you only ever read ONE novel in your life that's targeted to YA, you should read this one. Because it transcends age. It transcends genre. It's a memorable book that I won't soon forget, and once you read it, you won't either.

Review style: short and sweet and ABSOLUTELY NO SPOILERS. You will RUIN this book if you spoil it for yourself, even if you spoil yourself a little bit. The full review just lists five reasons why you should give this book a shot, so if you're interested, feel free to click the link below to my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome. :)

REVIEW: Justine Larbalestier's LIAR

Happy Reading! :)

Those of you acquainted with Stephen Fry may know him as his polymath self, impressively smart and quite funny.
This book is different from that, so try to forget him for a moment.
He does have tendency to draw out his sentences in a way that can make even the most terrible grammartarian wince.

This is not to say that the book is not good though! It follows Adrian through his adventures as a schoolboy with a crush on Hugo, to a Cambridge student embroiled in espionage. Adrian lies throughout the entire book, cruel and hilarious.
He laughs because otherwise the truth will break him.

The book might be a bit vulgar for some people; if prostitution and sex makes you feel uncomfortable - well, put those values away and read it anyway.

It will appeal to Anglophiles with a sense of wit.

Well, the end of the year is approaching, and as I've just started reading David Copperfield and I don't think I will finish before Friday (I like to savor Dickens and enjoy it slowly), I think it is time to list all the books I have read in 2009. I am going to count as I go...I really don't know how many it was.  I think I read about 25 last year, and my goal was to read more than that this year...hopefully 50. So let's see how I did!

( Click for my list and thoughts on each book! )

X-posted to my journal.

Just posted Review: Destined for an Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Hi.
I really enjoy reading history books about everyday life in times past. I have books by Daniel Poole and Liza Picard. I'm interested in U.S. history, British history, and European history. I'll check out pretty much anything though. Does anyone have any recommendations?

I like discussions of what people wore and ate and how the households were run, stuff along those lines. Thanks in advance for any help!

If you’ve read this far into the series, then I think you can figure out what’s happened to Tally Youngblood. For those of you that haven’t, but are still reading this, I’ll keep the spoilers to a minimum in the first couple of paragraphs. At the end of Pretties, Tally’s former friend Shay had a new trick up her sleeve: she’d turned into a Special, one of Dr. Cables surgically-altered attack dogs trained specifically for optimal performance outside city walls. Specials monitor activity outside of New Pretty Town, making sure no one dares to challenge the authority of the government. If they do, there’s a unique future ahead of them. It involves razor sharp teeth, nails, and senses fine-tuned for ultra-clarity. Specials are made to be tough and indestructible. Their bones are replaced with high-grade materials designed for light weight and fast movement; their tendons and muscles are similar. With bodies full of swarming nanos ready to repair any damage, Specials are as much construct as they are human. These cyborgs are kept as a threat to their fellow citizens who fear their power as much as they fear wolfish eyes and cruelly-angled faces. Specials were designed to be feared.

With the exaggerated features and artificial enhancements, Specials have an elevated sense of themselves. Their egos are blown out of proportion and they’re quick to anger. Shay’s group of Specials are culled from the Pretty clique known as the Cutters. Despite their physical advantages, they feel the need to cut themselves, achieving the same bubbly clarity from pain that Pretties got from a rush of adrenaline. Specials, though, need to be extra bubbly: they need to be icy. With their overconfidence and new slang, the Cutters go around finding Uglies and Pretties trying to make their way out to the New Smoke. Among these runaways are the ringleaders--David, Tally’s former boyfriend, Maddy, his mother and mass producer of the Pretty cure, the other old Smokies, and a new recruit, Andrew Simpson Smith, one time experiment and full-time freedom fighter.

( Read the rest! )

If you’ve read this far into the series, then I think you can figure out what’s happened to Tally Youngblood. For those of you that haven’t, but are still reading this, I’ll keep the spoilers to a minimum in the first couple of paragraphs. At the end of Pretties, Tally’s former friend Shay had a new trick up her sleeve: she’d turned into a Special, one of Dr. Cables surgically-altered attack dogs trained specifically for optimal performance outside city walls. Specials monitor activity outside of New Pretty Town, making sure no one dares to challenge the authority of the government. If they do, there’s a unique future ahead of them. It involves razor sharp teeth, nails, and senses fine-tuned for ultra-clarity. Specials are made to be tough and indestructible. Their bones are replaced with high-grade materials designed for light weight and fast movement; their tendons and muscles are similar. With bodies full of swarming nanos ready to repair any damage, Specials are as much construct as they are human. These cyborgs are kept as a threat to their fellow citizens who fear their power as much as they fear wolfish eyes and cruelly-angled faces. Specials were designed to be feared.

With the exaggerated features and artificial enhancements, Specials have an elevated sense of themselves. Their egos are blown out of proportion and they’re quick to anger. Shay’s group of Specials are culled from the Pretty clique known as the Cutters. Despite their physical advantages, they feel the need to cut themselves, achieving the same bubbly clarity from pain that Pretties got from a rush of adrenaline. Specials, though, need to be extra bubbly: they need to be icy. With their overconfidence and new slang, the Cutters go around finding Uglies and Pretties trying to make their way out to the New Smoke. Among these runaways are the ringleaders--David, Tally’s former boyfriend, Maddy, his mother and mass producer of the Pretty cure, the other old Smokies, and a new recruit, Andrew Simpson Smith, one time experiment and full-time freedom fighter.

( Read the rest! )

So, for christmas I got a barnes & nobles gift card and I really want to go in there knowing what I want to buy.

As far as previously read books in the sci-fi/fantasy genre, I really have to say my favorites so far has been The Wayfarer Redemption by Sara Douglass, and The Lord of The Rings. As well as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I'll admit, I'm sort of picky, I really do enjoy some romance in my stories, but not undeveloped, let's just fawn over each other two days after we met. And the more action, the better, I'm all for sword fights and magic, which I guess is implied with fantasy, ha.

Really, I don't know what else to say, just asking for you guys to throw whatever you can think of at me, I'm rather desperate at this point to find something good.

And any help would be much appreciated :]

Hey everyone, I'm a 19 year old female college student and looking for some recommendations. I've always loved reading and along with my major (English) I try to read as often as I can. I've always loved historical fiction, YA fiction (huge guilty pleasure of mine), and I've been trying to work my way through the british canon for years. but, anyway...

I've never really read crime/detective fiction, but I've always wanted to. The closest I read was nancy drew when I was younger, but the genre and I never coincided again. Here's my fear with the genre: crimes of a sexual nature really disturb me and it's not something I feel comfortable reading, and the same goes for literature that's really explicit (ie American Psycho) so I'm always nervous about picking a book at random and then not being able to sleep for nights at a time. Anyone have recommendations for interesting and well-written detective novels that don't involve sex crimes or explicit details? I guess I'm looking for something that's more psychological, but I'd also be interested in something that focuses as much on the detectives/staff themselves as the crime.

One last question: are the sherlock homes books worth a read? I know a lot of people are into it now because of the movie, but considering what I'm looking for, y/n?

thanks so much everyone :)

Or a history of reading


Unlike kids these days who are apparently required to read before they start kindergarten, I didn't begin reading until I was 7. Of course, my mother would probably proudly proclaim that I was reading at two or three, but this is nonsense--I vividly remember pulling a novel off my mother's bookshelf when I was six years old and utterly failing to understand enough words to make sense of it. But in first grade I figured out this reading business, and that was that--I was a reader.

I read the typical children's books of my day and just about everything available, but by 4th grade I had some clear preferences for young adult books in the sci-fi/fantasy vein, or just anything about people who weren't like me. As I matured into a teen, my interests focused pretty narrowly on folklore, fairytales, mythology, folklore analysis, and related realms of psychoanalysis. I considered majoring in folk and myth, but didn't get into a college which offered that degree.
( Read more... )

December was a pretty good month for me, book wise. It seemed like everything I picked up was enjoyable on one level or another. Then I decided I wanted to dive into some short fiction, and picked up Blood Lite, a horror comedy anthology, from my local book store. I was drawn to this particular book due to the fact that it had short fiction by some of my favorite paranormal writers: Charlaine Harris, Kelley Armstrong, and Jim Butcher. A first I found myself very happy with the content inside, but after a handful of stories, the collection quickly descended to some really bad material. Fortunately, things pick up at the end again, saving this anthology from being a complete waste of time. Still, the experience was somewhat like picking up a sandwich made with high quality bread, only to find that the meat inside was mostly rotten. Not really recommended.

For a complete list of contributors and mini-reviews for each story, check under the cut.

( Read more... )

Blood Lite is a anthology that looks at the lighter side of horror, giving us stories that cover a wide variety of topics. Unfortunately, we're also presented with a wide variety of quality, meaning you'll have to pick through the disappointments to find the good stories.

Rating: two and half stars
Length: 468 pages
Source: Mr. Paperback
Similar Books: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (my review)
Other books I've read by this editor: This is my first experience with Kevin J. Anderson

Mario Vargas Llosa – The feast of the goat

Vargas Llosa wrote many beautiful books, some of which I had read when I discovered this volume. A story about a country I learned to like a lot, that has been very important for me, written by an author I love to read. Try to find a better combination.

The goat in the title is Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, dictator in the Dominican Republic from 1930 ‘til 1961. His nickname likely stems from his many sexual escapades, preferably with (very) young girls.

Three storylines make up the novel. The story of the dictator himself, the daily business in and around the palace, in the local prisons, the parties, the girls, his staff and the politicians surrounding him. The second point of view in the book is a group of dissidents with a plan to kill the evil dictator. Their preparations and especially the last hours before the murder are well lit in this book.

Finally there is the story about Urania Cabral. Her father was a minister, she grew up surrounded by many people who never saw or didn’t want to see the evil schemes a country living under a dictator inevitably has. We follow her, years later, for the first time back in her native country after years in exile in the United States. This storyline is responsible for the title ‘novel’ on the cover of this book. She is the fictional character, it is because of her looking back in time that the reader gets to know what an animal the dictator actually is.

Vargas Llosa manages well to mingle the three story lines. He draws you in, bit by bit, which means that halfway into the book, you (the reader) must have an idea what will happen next, how it will all end, but mainly you’re so curious you want to continue reading. To me, that is a sign that a book must be well written, the author manages to drag you straight in.

Given my background, ten months in the Dominican Republic at the end of my study, this book is certainly recommended. A few aspects had my extra attention. The sisters Mirabal obviously appear in this novel. Any story about the resistance in Santo Domingo cannot ignore their role. In this book their role is small though, not more than a mere mention. Then again I had already read a children’s book while I lived there and later the brilliant ‘In the time of the butterflies’ by Julia Alvarez.

But the best supporting role to me has to be Joaquin Balaguer. Prime minister under dictator Trujillo, president after he died. Not only that. Over thirty years later, on my first entry into the country, he is back into power. Without any doubt he is the most important politician in the country during the last century. Not the dictator, but the man who lived to be a politician and was beyond ninety when he died, still in a support role for the current president, turned out to be the most historical figure in this book.

Vargas Llosa has written a beautiful book about a country that for many remains only known as a holiday destination. Somewhere in the Caribbean whit many luxury All Inclusive Resorts near fabulous beaches. Where everybody always seems to be optimistic, where life is always fun.

Unfortunately life wasn’t always fun, this book certainly proves that. Better than an ordinary history book, more catchy than a nivel, this book is recommended for anyone who likes to read about politics, who likes thrillers, good stories, true stories, history, basically anybody eager for a good book.

Quote: “When I see a beauty, a real woman, a woman who manages to get into your head, I don’t think about myself. I think of the Boss. Certainly, about him. Would he like to hold her on his arms, would he want to make love to her? I have never told this to anyone else. Not even to the Boss himself. But I’m sure he knows. He knows that he is my first thought, even when it gets to that area. And let me make one thing clear, I adore women, Agustin”

(p.298 Dutch translation, English version my own translation)

Number: 09-059
Title: Het feest van de bok (Orig.: La fiesta del chivo)
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Language: Dutch (Orig.: Spanish)
Year: 2001
# Pages: 446 (12558)
Category: Literature
ISBN: 90-290-7779-4

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